Wales: It's truly for the birds

On Skomer Island, Louise Tickle delights in close contact with puffins.

Portly puffins: Skomer Island is home to a vast avian population

12:01AM BST 02 Aug 2005

A hungry groan sounded plaintively from deep beneath a grassy tussock. High above the waves that crash against the cliffs of Skomer island, the many hundreds of portly little puffins chuntering around in the evening sunshine appeared to take no notice.

With their bills glowing richly orange, some birds slicked and preened snowy chest feathers to plump perfection while others gracefully extended black wingtips to an aching stretch, then folded them neatly back into place.

A beating flurry of wings heralded a puffin arriving home with its catch. Stalling awkwardly, its splayed feet dangled in the air for a moment before it collapse-landed on the cliff edge. With a beak stuffed full of silver fish, the puffin shook itself, gazed around in a puzzled fashion and scurried off to the burrow from where the groaning of the hungry chick was becoming ever more urgent.

A protected sanctuary for breeding puffins, guillemots, razorbills and the rare Manx shearwater, Skomer, just off the Pembrokeshire coast, is also a haven of tranquillity for volunteers who come to help out with habitat management.

During spring and summer a small number of visitors are permitted to stay on the island overnight. Accommo-dation is in a renovated cowshed, complete with gas lighting, rudimentary showers and drinking water that has previously been home to newts, toads and insect larvae.

However, by next year, the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, which manages the island, hopes to have completed some new low-impact accommodation using reclaimed stone to build upon the existing footprint of old farm buildings.

There will also be solar showers, dry composting lavatories and wind turbines to generate electricity. But on an island where birds raise their chicks in underground burrows, no development is without risk. The inadvertent introduction of rats, for example, must be avoided at all cost as the fast-breeding rodents would swiftly scoff every egg and chick they could find. With this in mind, all building materials used are quarantined before being shipped to the island.

Do stay overnight if you can because it will give you the chance to hear the eerie shriek of tens of thousands of Manx shearwaters returning home from the sea, reliant on the almost-dark to escape the clutches of the fierce greater and lesser black backed gulls. Every morning the picked-clean corpses of birds that didn't make it safely home litter the footpaths. But then, gulls have to eat too.

Be careful not to squash a friendly toad as you wander home from the late-night bird-log at the warden's bungalow. And make sure to bring enough food. Unless you're partial to a stolen sand eel or don't mind catching a baby rabbit for your dinner, there's precious little else to eat on the island, and it's an awfully long swim to the nearest Tesco.

Day trips to Skomer are run by Dale Sailing (01646 603110; www.dale-sailing.co.uk). Depending on the weather, boats run from Tuesday to Sunday from St Martin's Haven near Marloes; return crossing, £8. A landing fee of £8 is payable on arrival at Skomer. To stay overnight, contact the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales (01656 724100; www.wildlifetrust.org.uk).